Tag Archives: resources

201x Goal & Task Planners

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OK, OK, I know it’s February but here are your updated 2011 (in fact, this time they’re good for a decade) daily task and weekly goal planners.

I know a few of you out there in the internets still use these, if you’re not familiar you can read all about your day to week effectiveness here.

Few changes this time round…

  • Date format is 201    -    -    so they’re good for the next ten years.
  • There is an updated version of the Weekly Goal planner which allows for variable numbers of goals for a project. (The picture below shows this in action, along with an Example of the Daily Task Planner)
  • I’ve added a really simple weekly hours tracker which I use to keep track of hours against a project as I now have to do this.
  • I’ve put the whole lot, including original word files and example online. Go nuts.

View all the Planners | Shared via Google Docs.

Let me know how you get on with them…

Weekly Goal Planner Example

Daily Task Planner Example

Attention Plaxo Readers

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I am going to stop posting to Plaxo. If you are reading this blog and/or Twitter feed in Plaxo and want to continue to see updates then you will need to subscribe directly, see below. I am deleting my Plaxo account one week from today on August 6.

No offence Plaxo. It’s not you it’s me and yes, there is somebody else. Too many somebodies.

So if you are a Plaxo reader, please add me somewhere else…

While the idea of selectively sending content from different sources to different groups in Plaxo appealed initially, it just ended up sending updates to people who were already getting them elsewhere and gave me another profile to update. I just don’t need Plaxo, sorry (but best of luck n’all…).

I am also deleting my xing.com account at the same time. This doesn’t appear to affect anybody at all, which is reason enough to do it. That and because the name sounds like a Chinese word and isn’t, so it’s confusing.

Update 2010-08-06. Plaxo and Xing accounts have been deleted.

Quick Time Zones

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We were talking about time zones and how we remember them, I attempted to jot down how I remember them and what I remember.

Basically I just remember the ones I use regularly which is East Asia (ex. Japan), Europe, UK, Eastern USA and Western USA. The rest I can probably have a rough guess at, certainly enough to know whether I’m going to wake someone up in the middle of the night or not.

The way I remember them is as a series of time differences, Asia to Europe, Europe to UK, etc. The result is that only four time differences need to be remembered for my five important time zones but a further eighteen can be derived. Of course, you have to remember to add one during winter for everywhere except Asia.
The diagram that I jotted down looked something like this…

Remembering Timezones

How do you remember time zones?
Would this help?

Moving Around an EMACS Buffer

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A visual quick reference for moving around a buffer in Emacs.

EMACS Movement Cheat Sheet 2

Coincidentally both in my J-O-B and for a personal project I’ve been doing a little bit of development again recently. I’m not a software developer and spent only a year at the very begining of my career being one. I’m very much the hobyist here so it’s both fun and frustrating to pick it up again.

One of the minor irritations each time is how much EMACS I’ve forgotten. I’m still in the process of reading ‘The Back of the Napkin’ but this seemed like an opportunity to put my new ‘visual thinking’ skills to the test and see if I could make some EMACS commands stick in my swiss-cheese brain.

My Note Taking Key

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I’ve just started reading The Back of the Napkin which is apparently about Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, I’m interested in how this can improve my effectiveness so before I get too far with the book I thought it might be worth documenting what I have so far. Basically a personal short hand for taking notes. Not exactly a visual vocabulary for sure but it will be interesting to contrast this with where I end up after reading the book.

Like most people, this has evolved over time for taking notes in meetings, training, when reading, etc. I first noted this down when I covered it in some training I did on effective meetings a long time ago. The image below shows the key aspects of my key for note taking, mostly applicable to meetings. The key objective, of course, is to make sure I end up with a record of who, will do what, by when and also note informational items. All done in such a way that it’s easily extracted later (consistency being key here).

The key then looks like this…

My Note Taking Key

An example of this in use might look like this…
Note Taking Example

Playing With Prezi

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Super cool presentations with Prezi!

I was recently pointed at Prezi the new new thing in presentations and was instantly impressed by the eye-candy and then, on following their online demo stuff, even more impressed by the potential for presenting information of various kinds in a way that allows the viewer to see everything, move through logically or jump to something interesting and drill down. (h/t to@otfrom for the tip)

In an effort to understand it a little better I’ve been having a play. To speed up the process I have migrated (er, ish)  a ppt I did to support a speech I made at Toastmasters introducing Getting Things Done. The original ppt is available on slideshare here. The prezi is below, follow it through step by step or go mad clicking, zooming and swooping about. Bear in mind the original ppt was done to support an actual presentation not to simply be browsed.

That’s my best, er only, effort to date. For something truly cool, check out this one (not mine)… http://prezi.com/iwthettnve9q/

First Thoughts on GoogleWave

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Image Credit: "Google Wave en la actualidad" by Rafa.Garcés on Flickr

Image Credit: "Google Wave en la actualidad" by Rafa.Garcés on Flickr

My first thought with Google Wave was that this was something that was great, I could immediately see a bunch of uses for it…

  • More feature rich chat medium
  • Great for working collaboratively on creating text / documents.
  • A half way point between email and chat for conversations that spam a couple of days (you know when you feel you’re having a conversation by email).

But I have to be honest I did think it was too much of a paradigm shift. It’s been said elsewhere, but I did think it would go the way of RSS where it was just too much of a different way of thinking for people to get it any time soon.

And then people in my contacts list started using it and I was surprised not just by how many but by whom. The people I’ve been waving with are mostly not the obvious web2.0 earlier adopters. And then I started seeing what people are doing with embedded gadgets and it’s power really started to become apparent.

Now something else has just occurred to me about Google Wave. It’s the perfect back channel. We all have people in our contact list that we send links, thoughts, questions, etc. to multiple times a day. Currently we either send emails, which is a pain a) because emails are too asynchronous, the paradigm is a letter and people feel obliged to craft a proper response and b) everyone battles with keeping on top of their inbox. Or we send links in chat which is too synchronous, the paradigm is a conversation and useful stuff is too easily lost in the chatter or we feel we’re interrupting and people are obliged respond (immediately).

Wave is the perfect semi-synchronous (i think I made that up) medium. You can drop links, thoughts, snippets, whatever into wave and your collaborators can review later. You can have multiple people per wave (teams), or multiple waves per contact (different projects). Now I think for a project team, or for a bunch of other uses, that could be really powerful.

I’ve got some invites going spare if you’ve not tried Google Wave and would like to. If I know who you are (or if I don’t and you think you can convince me you deserve one :)   then let me know.

Personal MBA

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I’ve been dwelling on blogging this for a while because I wanted to have something other than just good intentions to talk about and that is hopefully where I am now, sort of. I’m taking the personal MBA. What’s that you ask? Well, let me tell you.

The personal mba as described on it’s web site is “an experiment in educational entrepreneurism” or perhaps more helpfully “set aside some dedicated reading time, pick up a good book, learn as much as you can, and go out and make great things happen”. The idea is built around a list of 42 books that if read, studied, discussed, absorbed would allow you to “progressively develop a greater understanding of business” and, better yet, “increase your effectiveness”.

The manifesto that describes it is here http://personalmba.com/manifesto/.

So, my journey has begun. I’ve read my first book off the list – David Allen’s Getting Things Done and am another convert to GTD. I’ve been using MonkeyGTD for a while. I’m now reading Keith Ferrazzi’s never eat alone, which isn’t on the list but I did hear about through the pmba forums. Through the forums I also found How To Read which is an amazingly effective technique.

A few of us down at the Muppet Show have been talking about it and it seems to be quite a popular concept, I’m certainly excited about it. If nothing else it gives you a structure to your self-learning and keeps you focused. What would be nice is if it became more widely recognised in the future and almost becomes a one-liner on your cv that tells potential employers that you are serious about your own personal development.